With clients increasingly specifying recycled grades, any mill closures that potentially further restrict supply can only be bad news in terms of prices and supply.

UK printers often complain that while they agree that as an industry we should use as much recycled paper as possible, it’s often too expensive and occasionally difficult to get hold of. (I’ll leave the argument of recycled paper versus that sourced from sustainable forests for another day.)

There’s little that can be done to improve the finances of individual mills like Pont Sainte Maxence. But from what I understand of lot a the supply, and therefore pricing, problem seems to stem from the quality of the waste that is recycled – it’s just not up to scratch. And that seems to be largely down to the quality of the sorting. So while it’s admirable that the UK is trying to clean up its act in terms of improving its ratio of recycled material to landfill waste, I can’t help but think that we should be concentrating on the quality of the waste we recycle rather than just the quantity.

In many European countries the consumer does a lot of the pre-sorting themselves, quite happily as far as I can work out. Whereas on these shores we prefer just to slap a hefty fine on any consumers that don’t recycle enough.

Using the stick rather than carrot method to encourage consumer recycling seems flawed to say the least. Rather than the consumer thoughtfully recycling, they just adopt the ‘if in doubt, chuck it in the green bin’ approach, which puts more pressure on the overstretched waste processing plants and ultimately reduces the quality of the raw material in the waste stream, which increases processing costs.

So while we can’t necessarily save a French paper mill, after all our own paper industry has enough problems, perhaps by the government and local councils adopting a more friendly approach to recycling we can at least increase the volume and decrease the price of recycled paper in the UK.

Darryl Danielli is editor of PrintWeek.